Trish's Blog

Most leadership teams are not short of ideas. Sit in enough of their meetings and you will find capable people with genuine insight, real experience, and plenty of views about what needs to change and why. The ideas are there. That is rarely what’s missing.

What’s missing, more often, is what happens after a certain kind of moment arrives in the room. The moment when someone says something that doesn’t quite fit the direction the conversation was heading. When a question is asked that nobody has a clean answer to. When two people in the room are clearly seeing the same situation very differently, and everyone else can feel it.

That moment, and what your team does with it, is where the real quality of your leadership culture lives.

What Most Teams Do With Tension

In most leadership meetings, tension gets managed. It gets eased over with a reframe, redirected toward something more comfortable, or shut down by the pace of the agenda moving on. Nobody makes an explicit decision to do this. It happens through the accumulated habits of a team that has learned, over time, that keeping things moving is safer than staying in the difficult part.

The result is a particular kind of meeting that is efficient, professional, and largely unproductive in the ways that matter most. The conversation stays within a familiar range. The decisions that get made are recognisable extensions of the decisions that came before them. And the thinking, the real thinking, the kind that might actually shift something, never quite gets started.

What’s left unexamined in those meetings doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. It shows up later as the strategy that looked sound in the room but didn’t hold up in practice, the risk nobody named because naming it would have slowed things down, the decision that felt aligned until the people who weren’t quite convinced started acting on their reservations quietly rather than raising them openly.

The cost of easing over tension is real. It just rarely seen in the meeting where the easing happened.

What’s Sitting Underneath

Here is what is worth understanding about tension in a leadership conversation: it is almost never just friction. It is almost always a signal that something real is present in the room that hasn’t yet been fully seen.

The moment someone names what isn’t quite lining up, something changes. You are no longer operating inside the shared assumptions the team brought into the room. You are starting to see what is really going on, the competing priorities that haven’t been made explicit, the gap between what the plan assumes and what people on the ground are experiencing, the question that exposes an assumption everyone has been treating as settled.

That is not comfortable. It is also not optional, if you want your team to produce thinking that is genuinely useful rather than professionally presentable.

The better ideas, the ones that could change something, sit underneath the surface of the conversation your team is used to having. They surface in the moments of tension, when someone brings a perspective that doesn’t fit neatly, asks the question that complicates the picture, or refuses to let an assumption pass unchallenged. Those moments are not disruptions to the work. They are the work.

Why Diversity of Thought Only Works If Tension Is Welcome

This connects directly to something that matters deeply for how you build a high-performing team. Diversity of thought, genuine diversity of thought, the kind that produces better decisions and more creative solutions, is not simply about who is in the room. It is about whether the room creates the conditions for different thinking to surface and do something useful.

Different thinking almost always introduces tension. A perspective that genuinely differs from the prevailing view doesn’t arrive smoothly. It arrives as friction, as the question that complicates the consensus, as the voice that slows down a conversation that was moving comfortably toward agreement. If your team’s instinct is to manage that friction rather than work with it, you are not getting the benefit of the diversity you have. You are getting the appearance of it.

This is what Weird Wisdom® at Work speaks to directly. Every person in your team carries a way of seeing shaped by their particular experience, background, and thinking. Some of that thinking will be unconventional. Some of it will be exactly what your team needs to hear to avoid a costly mistake, find a better direction, or see clearly what has been sitting in plain sight. But it only becomes useful when it surfaces. And it only surfaces consistently in teams where tension is understood as something to work with, not something to manage away.

When you build that kind of team, you are not just creating a more comfortable space for different voices. You are fundamentally changing the quality of the thinking your team is capable of producing.

What It Looks Like to Work With Tension

Working with tension rather than managing it is not about letting meetings become unstructured or allowing disagreement to run unchecked. It is about developing the habit of pausing at the moments that matter most, the moments when the room diverges, when a question lands without a clean answer, when someone names something that wasn’t on the agenda but clearly needs to be.

It means asking, when those moments arrive, what is actually being raised here rather than how quickly you can return to solid ground. It means treating the person who raised the difficult question as someone who has done the team a service, and making that visible. It means staying in the complexity a little longer than feels comfortable, because you understand that the thinking that happens there is more valuable than the efficiency of moving past it.

As a leader, you set the conditions for this. Your team is watching what you do when tension shows up. Whether you lean into it or redirect it. Whether you treat the uncomfortable question as a contribution or a complication. Whether the meeting that ended in productive disagreement is described afterward as a difficult one or a good one.

Those signals accumulate. Over time, they determine whether your team brings its real thinking into the room, or saves it for the conversation in the corridor afterward.

What Changes Everything

The teams that consistently produce remarkable outcomes are not the ones that have eliminated tension from their conversations. They are the ones where you have built the understanding that tension is often the first sign that there is more here than the team has been using.

That move, from tension as a problem to tension as a signal, changes what your meetings are capable of. It changes who feels it is worth speaking. It changes the quality of the decisions that come out of the room. And it changes what your team believes it is capable of, because it has experienced what becomes possible when it stops smoothing over the moments that matter and starts working with them instead.

Your team doesn’t have an ideas problem. It has a tension problem. And that is actually good news, because tension is something you can choose to work with, starting in the next meeting, the next moment someone names what isn’t quite lining up, the next time the room gets uncomfortable and the easier move would be to keep things moving.

That moment is the one worth staying in.